Well, as I just pointed out, “love” is a notoriously difficult thing to define.

Plus, we mean all kinds of different things when we use the word “love.”

My response to the email was to point out the difficulty in defining the word “love” and then I proceeded to define the word “love.”

Silly me.

Here’s the key part of my response: “… I can give a feeble, overly simplified (as is my tendency) definition of the agape-love I talk about in my article. Something like, ‘a selfless, unconditional caring for others’ seems sort of like what my understanding is. In this case, I also happen to think that it is rooted in who God is and, to borrow from the Hindu tradition, I believe it is connected to recognizing the divine in others.”

The thing is, after a few days of thinking about it – I was wrong.

Maybe not “wrong,” “incomplete” may be a better description of my response.

I should have said love is “a selfless, unconditional caring for others – in this life.”

You see, there are those who express their “love” of others by beating them with a Bible – judging their behavior, condemning them, attempting to controlling their every action.

To me, that doesn’t look very much like love.

To them, they think it is loving because they believe they are saving them from eternal damnation.

The folks who are trying to “love” the Hell out of other people identify themselves as Christians – people who follow Christ.

And therein lies my problem.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was primarily concerned with how people were treated in the ‘here and now.’ As it turns out, he didn’t do a lot of “loving” the Hell out of people.

He just loved the hell out of people.

The fact is, if we Christians could just focus on loving the hell out of people in this life, in the ‘here and now,’ and let God worry about the next life – the world we live in would look a lot less like Hell to most people than it does right now.

Love may be a notoriously difficult thing to define, but most folks sure do know it when they see it.